The first exoplanet ever discovered in 1995 was what we now call a “hot Jupiter,” a planet as massive as Jupiter with an orbital period of just a few days. Today, hot Jupiters are thought to have formed far from their stars—similar to Jupiter in our solar system—and later migrated inward.
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Stanford engineers debuted a new framework introducing computational tools and self-reflective AI assistants, potentially advancing fields like optical computing and astronomy.
Quantum technologies are systems that leverage quantum mechanical effects to perform computations, share information or perform other functions. These systems rely on quantum states, which need to be reliably transferred and protected against decoherence (i.e., a gradual loss of quantum information).
The release of the lone detainee leaves no known suspect, with officials pledging to ramp up the investigation by canvassing for surveillance video that could help pinpoint the suspect
One of the oldest unsolved riddles in planetary science concerns the origin of the moon. Over a century ago, George Darwin proposed that tidal and centrifugal forces on a rapidly rotating proto-Earth caused the moon to be spun off into an Earth orbit.
SpaceX has authorized an insider share sale that values Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite maker at about $800 billion, according to a company message seen by Bloomberg on Dec. 12.
What could force a supermassive black hole (SMBH) out of its host galaxy? They can have hundreds of millions, even billions of solar masses. What’s powerful enough to dislodge one of these behemoths?
Some scholars argue that around the end of the last ice age, some 12 thousand years ago, our ancestors started building complex ancient cities around the globe. In terms of written history, there is evidence of complex cities existing on Earth around 10,000 years ago. In this article, we take a look at 15 of the greatest ancient cities ever built on the surface of the planet.  Jericho According to scholars, Jericho was a center of commerce and living as early as 9,000 BC. Jericho is considered one of the oldest continually occupied cities on the surface of the planet. Home to the lucrative opobalsamum plant, Jericho produced the most expensive oil in the world, thousands of years ago. In addition to being a center of commerce and industry, the city was was home to a number of temples and military fortifications. Uruk We can’t write a list describing the greatest cities in ancient times without leaving a spot for Uruk, considered the largest city on the planet around 3500 BC. Much of its history has been lost as newer structures were built upon its ancient buildings. Uruk means land between the rivers. Ur Once home to more than 100,000 people, the only thing that remains of this great city today are its ruins. However, around 2000 BC, the city of Ur was home to some of the most amazing handcrafted luxury items in the region, made of precious metals and stones imported from different sources. Babylon Scholars estimate that Babylon was the largest city in the world from circa 1770 – circa 1670 BC, and again between circa. 612 – circa. 320 BC. Some argue it was the first city to reach a population above 200,000. The city was a key kingdom in ancient Mesopotamia. Babylon was built on the shores of the Euphrates river. Its ruins are located in present-day Hillah, Iraq. Mari An ancient city few have heard of. Despite not being as famous as other cities like Babylon, Uruk, or Jericho, the city of Mari was a robust trade capital of ancient Mesopotamia. It was a central marketplace of the region through which stone, timber, agricultural goods, and pottery were moved. In terms of archaeology, the city of Mari proved to be a treasure-trove for scholars. In 1933, archaeological excavations at Mari resulted in the discovery of more than 25,000 tablets that included significant information about the administration of state during the 2nd millennium BC and the nature of diplomatic relations between the political entities in the region. Çatalhöyük Modern-day Turkey is the home of countless archaeological sites that helped rewrite history as we know it. The ancient city of Çatalhöyük is considered by many scholars as the world’s first city. In fact, there is evidence that around 6,500 BC, the city was home to three thousand people. Archaeological evidence suggests that the city was densely built, resulting in people walking on the roofs of its mud-brick homes instead of the street. The city was mysteriously abandoned around 5,700 BC. Archeological excavations revealed a wall painting in the city which has been dubbed as the oldest map in existence and the oldest landscape painting in the world. Nineveh The ancient city of Nineveh (located in modern-day Iraq) is believed to have been inhabited as early as 6000 BC. Built as a massive religious center of the Goddess Ishtar, Nineveh spread across more than 7 square kilometers. Archeological evidence suggests Nineveh was the largest city in the world for nearly half a century, until the year 612 BC when, after a bitter period of civil war in Assyria, it was sacked. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) occupied the site during the mid-2010 destroying countless historic monuments and artifacts. Nimrud Another ancient city located in present-day Iraq. The city of Nimrud was home to more than 80,000 people around 800 BC. Nimrud served as the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The city was identified as the Biblical city of Calah. Regrettably, this is another city that was bulldozed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Alexandria We can’t speak of the greatest cities on the surface of the planet without mentioning Alexandria, a city built by Alexander the Great. Alexandria was home to the Great Library of Alexandria—considered the largest library in the world. The city was also home to one of the tallest buildings on Earth, the Great Lighthouse of Alexandria. Baghdad. The city of Baghdad was founded in the 8th century and became the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate. Soon after its foundation, the city became a significant cultural, commercial, and academic center in the Islamic world. According to experts, the city of Baghdad was the largest city of the Middle Ages for much of the Abbasid era, peaking at a population of more than a million. The city was planned as a circle about 2 km (1.2 mi) in diameter, coming to be known as the “Round City.” Memphis Egypt is undoubtedly home to many mind-bending ancient cities, and Memphis is surely one of them. After the unification of Egypt around 3100 BC, the city of Memphis was founded as the new capital. The city is located some twenty kilometers south of present-day Cairo. The city is well-known for its nearby pyramids as well as the Great Sphinx. According to Tertius Chandler, Memphis was called home by some 30,000 inhabitants and was by far the largest settlement worldwide from the time of its foundation until around 2250 BCE and from 1557 to 1400 BCE. Chang’an Its name means ‘Perpetual place’. In 700AD, the city of Chang’an was home to a population of more than one million people. It was the capital of more than 10 dynasties. Chang’an had been settled since Neolithic times. Poet Bai Juyi said the city had “hundreds of, thousands of houses — like a great chessboard … like a huge field planted with rows of cabbages.” The city lives on today as the city of Xi’an. Varanasi Varanasi, in India, is one of the oldest cities in the world. Believed to have been inhabited since at least the 11th century BC. The city is considered a major religious hub in India. It’s also the holiest of the seven sacred cities in Hinduism and Jainism. According to Hindu mythology, Varanasi was founded by Shiva one of three principal deities along with Brahma and Vishnu. One of its most notorious sites is the Golden Temple, which honors the Hindu god Shiva. Angkor The ancient city of Angkor served as a capital for the Khmer empire flourishing from the ninth to the 15th century. Home to the magnificent temple complex of Angkor Wat. However, the city of Angkor is home to more than one thousand temples. In 2007, an international team of researchers sed satellite photography and other modern techniques to discover that Angkor had been the largest pre-industrial city in the world. Teotihuacan Located in modern-day Mexico, the ancient city of Teotihuacan home to some of the most impressive pyramids on the surface of the planet. While we still don’t know who built this ancient city or when, archaeologists estimate that around the first millennium AD, Teotihuacan emerged as the largest city in America, with a population estimated at more than125,000 people. Featured Image: The Round city of Baghdad. Image Credit: Pinterest. Copyright Ancient Code. Unless otherwise stated by Ancient Code, no Content published on www.ancient-code.com, www.ancient-code.es may be copied, distributed, published, rewritten or used in any way, in whole or in part, without prior written agreement from Ancient Code. While Atlantis is perhaps one of the most famous mythological lost cities said to have existed on Earth, a number of other legendary cities make the list behind Atlantis. The Lost City of Z is perhaps the most sought-after lost city in the history of mankind. Countless expeditions have been organized to find the city, but despite this, no one has ever managed to find evidence of its existence. The most famous to have searched for the Lost City of Z was a man called Percy Harrison Fawcett, a renowned explorer who tried discovering the long-lost city thought to remain hidden somewhere in the Amazon jungle. In this article, we’ve gathered 25 of the most interesting things you should know about this legendary lost city. The Lost City of Z—The remnants of an Atlantean city?  According to myths and legends, the lost City of Z would have been erected in very ancient times by the descendants of Atlantis. The name Lost City of Z was given by Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett. The ancient city is believed to have been located somewhere in the jungle of the Mato Grosso state of Brazil. The lost city of Z was the product of Fawcett’s theories that in the distant past, an advanced ancient civilization once existed there, and the ruins of the city of Z may have belonged to that civilization. Fawcett made eight expeditions searching for the lost city, disappearing in his last expedition, under strange circumstances. The search for the Lost City of Z began after Col. Fawcett discovered an ancient document titled Manuscript 512, kept in the National Library of Brazil. The document—Manuscript 512—is believed to have been authored by Portuguese Bandeirantes, João da Silva Guimarães. The document is believed to describe the Lost City of Z in detail. João da Silva Guimarães claimed in the manuscript that he came across the ruins of an ancient city in ruins, containing arches, statues, and temples covered in hieroglyphs, deep in the Amazonian Jungle in 1753. While Guimarães described the city in great detail, he failed to give off its location. It is believed that Fawcett’s conviction was fed in part due to the rediscovery of the lost city of Machu Picchu in 1911. In addition, during Fawcett’s numerous travels through the American Continent, Fawcett heard rumors of a secret ancient underground city located ‘somewhere’ in the jungles of Chile, which, according to tales, legends, and reports, was made of streets paved with silver and roofs of gold. Fawcett imagined exactly what the City of Z may look like. He described his ideas in a letter written to his son Brian: “I expect the ruins to be monolithic in character, more ancient than the oldest Egyptian discoveries. Judging by inscriptions found in many parts of Brazil, the inhabitants used an alphabetical writing allied to many ancient European and Asian scripts. There are rumors, too, of a strange source of light in the buildings, a phenomenon that filled with terror the Indians who claimed to have seen it. The central place I call “Z” — our main objective — is in a valley surmounted by lofty mountains. The valley is about ten miles wide, and the city is on an eminence in the middle of it, approached by a barreled roadway of stone. The houses are low and windowless, and there is a pyramidal temple. The inhabitants of the place are fairly numerous, they keep domestic animals, and they have well-developed mines in the surrounding hills. Not far away is a second town, but the people living in it are of an inferior order to those of “Z.” Farther to the south is another large city, half buried and completely destroyed.” In 1921, the first expedition to find the Lost City of Z was assembled by Fawcett. His search for Z culminated with his disappearance and the appearance of many myths and tales surrounding his faith. Fawcett’s last expedition was set in March in April of 1925, this time financed by newspapers and societies such as the Royal Geographic Society and the Rockefellers. Fawcett was certain that his expedition would culminate with the discovery of the mythical city. Fawcett’s beliefs were greatly influenced on what the Indians had told him about alleged Lost Cities spread across the Amazon jungle. Even his penultimate letter – nine days before he mysteriously vanished, mentions one such tale. The Final written words of Col. Fawcett, sent to his wife were: “My dear Nina, The attempt to write is fraught with many difficulties, thanks to the legions of flies that pester one from dawn till dusk – and sometimes all through the night! The worst are the tiny ones that are smaller than a pinhead, almost invisible, but sting like a mosquito. Clouds of them are always present. Millions of bees add to the plague, and other bugs galore, stinging horrors that get all over one’s hands. Even the head nets won’t keep them out, and as for mosquito nets, the pests fly through them! It is quite maddening. Each expedition mounted after the disappearance of Fawcett ended in the same fate. Fawcett’s disappearance resulted in a total of 13 expeditions being mounted in which more than a hundred people lost their lives, attempting to find not only Fawcett but the Legendary Lost City of Z as well. No one knows what exactly happened to Fawcett, his expedition, and to more than one hundred people that set out to search for him after he disappeared in the Amazon. Many scholars believe that Fawcett and his team were killed by an Amazonian tribe. Other theories state that Fawcett and his team either starved, drowned or suffered a disease. There are some who also say that they may have been robbed and killed by bandits in the region. The City was never found, and eventually, explorers, archeologists, and adventurers gave up looking for the city actively. Despite the fact that no one managed to discover the Lost City of Z, a number of ancient cities are believed to remain hidden deep within the Amazonian rainforest. The story of behind the Lost City of Z was so popular that books were written about it, and even a movie was filmed. Featured Image Credit: Leon Tukker. Used with permission. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are irregular dwarf galaxies and satellites of the Milky Way. The LMC is about 163,000 light-years away and the SMC is about 206,000 light-years away, and their close proximity makes them excellent laboratories for the study of galaxies in general. The Clouds are the focus of a new research group being formed at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP).
A research team has investigated long-term X-ray variability in the neutron star NGC 7793 P13, an object thought to be driven by supercritical accretion, where an extraordinary amount of gas falls onto the object and emits intense X-rays. The team found a relation between the X-ray luminosity and the rotation velocity, which could provide clues to reveal the supercritical accretion mechanism.
Rocky planets like our Earth may be far more common than previously thought, according to new research published in the journal Science Advances. It suggests that when our solar system formed, a nearby supernova (the massive explosion of a star near the end of its life) bathed it in cosmic rays containing the radioactive ingredients to make rocky, dry worlds. This mechanism could be ubiquitous across the galaxy.
Liquids and solutions are complex environments—think, for example, of sugar dissolving in water, where each sugar molecule becomes surrounded by a restless crowd of water molecules. Inside living cells, the picture is even more complex: tiny liquid droplets carry proteins or RNA and help organize the cell’s chemistry.
In a new study published in Nature Physics, researchers have achieved the first experimental observation of a fragile-to-strong transition in deeply supercooled water, resolving a scientific puzzle that has persisted for nearly three decades.
In Brief: “The Pushpaka Vimana that resembles the Sun and belongs to my brother was brought by the powerful Ravana; that aerial and excellent Vimana going everywhere at will … that chariot resembling a bright cloud in the sky … and the King [Rama] got in, and the excellent chariot at the command of the Raghira, rose up into the higher atmosphere.’” Hindu mythology is filled with incredible tales, stories mythologies and most importantly written texts. In previous articles, we covered the Mahabharata and the countless powerful weapons described in it. According to Ancient Hindu history –one of the most extensive on the planet– their ancient sacred texts called the ‘Vedas’ speak of incredible flying ships that visited our planet over 6000 years ago.  In this article, we take a look at the Vimana, more specifically, the ancient Pushpaka Vimana, a powerful ancient flying vehicle described in Hindu texts and Sanskrit epics. The Pushpaka Vimana of king Ravana (who captured the Vimana from Lord Kubera; and Rama returned it to Kubera) is the most quoted example of a vimana. Vimanas are also mentioned in Jain texts—Jainism, an ancient Indian religion. If we take a look at ancient Sanskrit and the etymology of the Vimana, we will find that it means “measuring out, traversing” or “having been measured out”. Reference to the ancient Vimana can be found in the Mahabharata, which is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India: “At Rama`s behest, the magnificent chariot rose up to a mountain of cloud with a tremendous din. Another passage reads: Bhima flew with his Vimana on an enormous ray which was as brilliant as the sun and made a noise like the thunder of a storm. Author Monier Monier-Williams—the second Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford University describes the Ancient Vimana as “a car or a chariot of the gods, any self-moving aerial car sometimes serving as a seat or throne, sometimes self-moving and carrying its occupant through the air; other descriptions make the Vimana more like a house or palace, and one kind is said to be seven stories high,” quoting the Pushpaka Vimana as one of the most worthy examples. In modern languages, Vimana is usually translated to aircraft. In many depictions of Vimana, we see these powerful, alleged machines, depicted as being as big as a temple.  The Vimana predecessor In ancient Sanskrit Epics, the Vimana were the so-called flying chariots used by a number of different ancient Gods. Various Vedic deities are described as using, flying, wheeled chariots to move from one place to another. Some verses of ancient texts have been interpreted by different authors as evidence of ‘mechanical birds’. In the Rigveda (an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns), for example, we find the following description: “Dark the descent: the birds are golden-coloured; up to the heaven they fly robed in the waters. Again, descend they from the seat of Order, and all the earth is moistened with their fatness. Twelve are the fellies, and the wheel is single; three are the naves. What man hath understood it? Therein are set together spokes three hundred and sixty, which in nowise can be loosened.”—The Hymns of the Rigveda by Ralph Thomas Hotchkin Griffith. According to Swami Dayananda Saraswati— a renowned scholar of the Vedic lore and Sanskrit language—the ancient Vimana were powerful spacecraft: “jumping into space speedily with a craft using fire and water … containing twelve stamghas (pillars), one wheel, three machines, 300 pivots, and 60 instruments.”—A critical study of the work “vymanika shastra”. The Pushpaka Vimana The Pushpaka Vimana is usually described as a mythological flying palace or chariot. In the Ramayana, we find another extraordinary description of the Vimana, more specifically the Pushpaka Vimana: “The Pushpaka Vimana that resembles the Sun and belongs to my brother was brought by the powerful Ravana; that aerial and excellent Vimana going everywhere at will … that chariot resembling a bright cloud in the sky … and the King [Rama] got in, and the excellent chariot at the command of the Raghira, rose up into the higher atmosphere.’” The Pushpaka Vimana appears as the first flying vimana mentioned in existing Hindu texts. The powerful Pushpaka Vimana was built e by Vishwakarma for Brahma, the Hindu god of creation. This Vimana was later given by Brahma to Kubera, the God of wealth. Eventually, the Pushpaka Vimana was stolen, along with Lanka, by his half-brother, king Ravana. Featured Image Credit: Leon Tukker |
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